Better the Deathbed You Know
by Dumbothepatronus
Summary: It's been seventeen lifetimes. Two thousand years of Hermione Granger, constant irritation and source of eternal guilt. Despite the horror he finds himself in, he isn't sure he has the courage to defy the circumstances he was born into and put his fate at risk to save the witch whose blood cries out to him. One-shot, unless I decide to expand this eventually.


**This fic has been nominated for the Judges Pick award at Quidditch League, September 2019***

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry:

Technomancy, Task #2: Include a significant use of Apparition in your story

A/N: warnings for implied character death (in the past)

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter

Thank you to Lizzy for betaing this for me!

* * *

Their past called to him.

He really wished it wouldn't.

It called to him in the swing of her hips, the sweep of her wand. In the overeager cadence of her voice when she answered a question in Mcgonnagall's class for the fifth time on a Tuesday afternoon.

These were the moments that the memories came to him, through the dull golden haze of the corners of his mind.

If Draco could make them stop, he would. He wished it were that easy.

But theirs was an ancient magic; destiny, or perhaps doom.

Her hand was in the air again. It wiggled like a fish on a spear. Disgusting. And yet, he couldn't tear his eyes away.

"Yes, Miss Granger?"

Curse Professor McGonagall and her inexplicable need to actually call on the thing, as if every sixth-year student at Hogwarts hadn't had to endure her insufferable way of speaking so frequently that it had become permanently etched into the tiny bones of their ears.

"So, from what I understand, in order to change the outcome, we must see the vision clearly in our minds."

Fire danced on the edges of his vision, burning the mellow tones the afternoon light cast over the classroom into golden sepias, like those dingy Muggle photographs he'd had to endure in Depression-era America.

He sneered at nobody in particular as the classroom faded away.

He was in Greece now. It was often Greece, especially recently. His subconscious was probably trying to tell him something, and that was the only lifetime he'd ever bothered to learn anything about anything.

His schoolmaster, cast in the amber hues of the memory, stroked his chin and peered down at the boy Draco had been, thousands of years ago.

"I have heard of such visions, but they are rare indeed."

"What do they mean? Do they tell the future?"

The old man shook his head sadly, almost wistfully. "Not the future, but the past."

"How do I make them stop?"

"They won't stop, child. They are you; they are your history. The mistakes you've made, the lifetimes you've botched. You can't change the past. All you can do is fix the future."

Grecian Draco grimaced. He knew what the visions wanted of him. It was always her, and she was always beneath him. His eyes flashed to the slave girl, scrubbing the tiled floor of his tutor's house.

She scrubbed as if she knew something. As if each colorful square held ancient knowledge and magic; as if it were all a puzzle she'd solved long ago.

Pretentious girl. She wasn't worth saving. Not when he'd have to give up everything he owned to do it. If he ignored it, if he let her die the way she always did, he knew exactly what to expect.

He'd die, too; but in a familiar way—an expected way. Then he'd be reborn into relative luxury and power, and he'd get to live the life he coveted for about twenty years before he would have to start over again.

Who knew what would happen if he upset the balance.

The edges of the vision burned again, and color seeped back into his world.

The students were filing out of the classroom; he'd missed the last few minutes. Even when she wasn't directly interacting with him, she managed to be such a nuisance.

He liked this life. It had everything he held dear—status, wealth, luxury—the ability to openly practice magic.

Unfortunately for him, he could already see the crash-course hers had started on, and he could tell she wasn't long for this world.

Bold, daring, reckless—she was always the same. She was the exact opposite of what he needed her to be.

He waved his wand over his Transfiguration notes, rolled them into a scroll and stowed them away for later before he headed out the door. If he was lucky, she had already scurried off to her tower with her uncouth little Gryffindor friends.

He snorted. She always found the most trouble possible. But then again, so did he, and he wasn't planning to change.

The hallway was empty, and the timing was perfect for him to slip out to the Room of Hidden Things. His eyes darted from wall to wall as he slunk through the castle, but he encountered no one until he happened upon her.

She leaned against her back, one foot on the ground and one against the rugged stone of the wall, a book held in front of her face, only partially obscuring her wild curls.

He swallowed. She looked just like she had in Salem, weeks before his father's infamous witch hunt. Fire crawled through his belly as the memory of her eyes locked onto his, silently pleading, burned through his memory.

He couldn't do it then. To save her would have been suicide.

But in the end, it didn't matter. He never outlived her by long.

He blinked away the guilt and pain as he took the final steps towards the door where she stood sentinel.

"Move, Granger. You've no business here."

She didn't flinch, didn't blink. Her left hand rose to turn the page of _The Standard Book of Spells, Year Six._ "You're getting yourself into trouble. I can tell."

He growled. "What I do with myself is none of your business."

The book fell to her hip, and she finally met his glare. When she spoke, her voice was soft. "You're not doing well, Draco; I can see it. You look wrong. If you would just let me help you—"

Her words were a stinging hex to his heart. Let her help him? That wasn't how this worked. He was the one eternally at fault; she had no obligation to right the wrongs he'd committed. He didn't deserve her forgiveness.

If she was even aware of his sins at all. It was possible that he alone was haunted by their shared past, and she was blissfully oblivious of the lifetimes she'd followed him through; of the numerous ways he'd neglected her to death.

He certainly hoped that was the case.

"If you know what's best for you, you'll stay away from me." Draco stomped past her, past the Room of Hidden Things, the clomp of his boots a measured drum-beat upon the stone floor. If he didn't keep walking, he might not be able to stop himself. He might give in, and allow himself to ghost his fingers over the curve of her cheek.

He had only made that mistake once, in the rolling hills of upper Scotland—as Granger stood amid the tall grasses, surrounded by her flock. He'd been the son of a general then; an English general.

This memory always punched through in full color, void of the dull golden tones that marked the rest. The brightness of it burned him, nearly as strongly as he burned every time she died.

X

Winter faded into spring, but still, the past called to him. Haunted him. She was on every page of his textbook, in every gleam of his eye. Her blood screamed out to him with each step he took towards the future.

In the end, despite his internal dilemma, he did what he had always done; he followed the power.

This century's villain was Voldemort. This time, Draco had been cast as the arrogant Pureblood heir, expected to spit upon the Muggleborn scum. He did his duty, and he took his mark, as he had in every lifetime.

But that stuffy summer night, as he held his wand against the faded grey face of Hogwarts' headmaster, he crumbled. He'd always been adjacent to evil, to oppression; but never an instrument of death.

Yet, even though he shrank at killing Dumbledore, he couldn't find the courage to actively rebel against his situation. His sense of self-preservation was strong, nearly insurmountable. Ironically, it was always the death of him.

That night, once Snape had shouldered the burden and Dumbledore's body had fallen from the tower, Draco caught his last glimpse of her for a while.

She gazed at him from her tower as he fled to the woods, and the sight set his mind ablaze.

_She much looked the same, even centuries ago; intelligent eyes and glorious hair, staring down at him from a domed window cut into a city wall—watching him run in the opposite direction. _

_Flames licked at the dusty gate, burned the shrubs at the base, and his army held the torches that had started the fire._

_He was a prince, the son of a king, and he couldn't save her. To save her would have been treason. It would have meant his death._

_He had died anyway, on the muddy banks of a drought-starved riverbed, clutching at his heart as he rolled in the dirt. _

He was nearly at the treeline when the gold faded from his vision. Maybe he could save her this time. Maybe he could end this madness if only to save himself another broken heart.

X

He didn't have to wait too much longer for his chance to twist fate. It had been nearly a year—the leaves had barely begun to bud on the trees of the Manor when a commotion drew him to the main floor of his home.

She writhed on the floor of his sitting room, her screams contrasting oddly with the pristine Victorian furniture delicately arranged throughout the room.

It was Salem all over again.

Bellatrix cackled and flicked her wand towards Hermione, whose screams somehow grew even louder in response.

Draco was in agony. Every shriek split him in half, burned him from within. Logically, he knew these things happened. He knew that she always died.

Only once had he been forced to watch it happen.

He couldn't do it again.

He startled as her screaming stopped and watched, horror-struck, as Bellatrix retrieved the cursed knife she kept in her boot. It was now or never.

It felt like he was wading through quicksand as he forced his feet to move forward and do what he had failed to do sixteen times before. His overwhelming sense of self-preservation screamed at him as he stood between his aunt and his destiny and held out his hand.

He didn't trust his voice to speak, but luckily, he didn't need to. With a knowing look in her eye, Bellatrix deposited the knife in his outstretched palm. "Oooohhh, does Drakey-dearie want a turn with the Mudblood? How rude of me not to share my toy!"

Draco's lips twitched. With his wand in one hand and the knife in the other, he stalked to Hermione's side. It would be too easy. As the heir of Malfoy Manor, he could disapparate from the grounds unrestricted. All it would take was a flick of his wand.

That, and familial disownment. The loss of millions of galleons. A fall from the lap of luxury.

Though if she died, he would have to start again anyway.

Maybe this time they would die together when he botched their escape attempt.

Seventeen lifetimes flashed before his eyes as he grabbed her wrist, turned on his heel, and disapparated; then disapparated again, and again.

He took them back to Scotland, to the rolling green hills. The pasture was abandoned now; no sheep to keep them company. But the scent! The gentle breeze stirred the long grasses, rippled them in waves over the ground. It smelled exactly like that day.

She groaned and rolled over in the blanket of grass, and her hands flew up to rub at her eyes. "Draco, what—"

He cringed. Would she kill him, now that they were alone? If he died first, would she be free to live on? Would it break the curse that had followed them across the world and through time?

He sank into the grass and curled his knees up under his chin. His eyes never left her as she rolled to her side and blinked at the countryside.

"Are we in…?"

"Scotland. We're far from anyone who wishes to hurt you, so you're free to do as you like now."

"I've been here before." She searched his eyes. "I remember."

She remembered? If she remembered anything, she would want nothing to do with him. It was probably for the best.

He didn't dare move as she inched towards him. He was a statue, carved into the landscape as she advanced until he could touch the tip of her nose with his thumb.

"I remember you." She paused, ran her fingertips across his cheekbone. "I remember us here. It's always been my favorite one."

He looked away, up and over the hills at the soft oranges of the setting sun. "Granger, if you remember half of what I remember, I think it's clear that we're done here."

"I've done research, you know. I always do research."

"Why am I not surprised?"

"There isn't a whole lot on the subject, strictly speaking. It appears that it's very rare. I couldn't find any cases of it happening exactly in this way, though I imagine that's partially your fault."

Obviously. He was likely the only spirit in history to have botched seventeen lifetimes in a row.

"You can fix it now if you want to. Or we can continue this dance until the end of time."

He rolled his eyes, but the corners of his lips turned upwards. She was as opinionated as ever.

"And how do I do that?"

"You have to switch sides. You have to come over to mine. It's what you are meant to do."

"And what happens then? When the Dark Lord kills us both, will we be reborn on the same side next time? Or will we finally be allowed to die forever?"

Hermione smiled at the long grasses as she weaved them through her fingers. "I don't know, but I do know this: I don't plan to lose this war. Together, we can only win."

"And you'll trust me, just like that? After all the times I've abandoned you?"

She shrugged. "What's the worst that can happen? After sixteen deaths, I'm not afraid of anything. But I am intrigued by you." Her eyes softened. "I'd like to discover exactly why your soul is anchored to mine."

He supposed he might as well. After his act of rebellion, there would be no going back to the life he lived before. And for the first time in centuries, he was at peace with that. He nodded.

"Great!" she said. "Now help me come up with a plan. We're going to have to hurry if we want to save Harry and Ron."

* * *

Written for Quidditch Leauge, Falmouth Falcons, Beater 2

Prompt: A character defects from the dark side to join the light

Optional Prompts:

(color) burnt gold

(song) Fire by Ohio Players


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